


Ride on home

by cuimhl



Category: The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Crushes, F/M, Fluff ?, M/M, a bit fragmented really, them in primary school
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-06 07:05:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5407514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/cuimhl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's this girl who Achilles likes, but Pat will always be the one beside him, all the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ride on home

**Author's Note:**

> Just something small; I'd like to write some more about them in primary school, because puppy!! love!! Also, the time is really uneven.  
> Hope you enjoy!

There’s this girl who Achilles likes.

She has long brown hair and likes to wear blue headbands, and she has a pretty smile. The only catch is, she won’t look his way.

“I’ve heard she doesn’t like jocks,” Pat tells him as he slumps against the brick wall of the equipment shed, morose. He’s heard that too. Still, it hasn’t stopped him from trying before - what difference does it make now?

Pat unwraps his sandwich and shoves it into Achilles’ mouth, “Eat.” He fumbles with the gladwrap and tries to speak around the huge impediment crammed between his teeth, but Pat breaks into a face-splitting grin at the sight and that’s that. “Sure,” he mumbles after the first bite goes down, “Thanks.”

\---

At home, Achilles’ mother doesn’t make his lunch. She insists that he do it himself - he’s ten now, double digits and all. “I’m not another number in a statistic of housewife mothers,” she proclaims, and Achilles secretly agrees. No, she’s not. However, he can’t help criticising her feminist outings every once in awhile (all in his head, of course, it doesn’t sound nice when it comes out of his mouth) because frankly, it seems more like a radicalist movement, the way that she waves flags and yells slogans and criticises male politicians. In his highly uneducated opinion, Achilles thinks that she cares more about making her disgust known than advocating for change.

Anyway, he wouldn’t mind if only he wasn’t so busy. Every afternoon is filled up with swimming or cricket or tap-dance and whatever, and he doesn’t get home until late. Then he does his homework, because “How do you plan to succeed on brawns alone?”

Achilles doesn’t. He wants to go to art school with Pat and paint pretty grass hills with him all day. But it’s not like anyone asked. The point is, he’s usually busy and by the time he wakes up the next morning, it’s a struggle just to pack and wash up and eat breakfast before the schoolbus arrives down the road, let alone make his lunch. His dad has work early in the morning and is rarely around.

\---

The bell rings and it’s another fruitless lunchtime of calling names and throwing bags over fences, hoping that she’ll notice. “I think she has something against me,” he moans in a hoarse whisper in the middle of geography, and Pat kicks his shin before casting a quick glance to the teacher, then bending over their table and whispering back. “Everyone has something against you, Achilles,” he says matter-of-factly, with a small smile.

“There’s no need to be rude,” Achilles mutters, but they share a grin and duck their heads when the teacher ambles through the rows of tables with a clack of her nails on desks. 

It’s the truth. Everyone at school either likes or dislikes him for a particular reason, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s easily the most popular anywhere. Some begrudge him his looks, some his academic results, some his athletic prowess. Few think to look for him in the library half an hour before the first class starts, trying to finish his maths homework before snatching Pat’s away and copying it down furiously. No one cares if he goes home at seven in the evening and trudges painstakingly through every question and task, hungry to improve. 

Pat knows, because he’s always the first one he calls when things come to a head.

\---

“It’s my birthday next week,” Achilles announces with bright eyes the following morning, and Pat raises his brows. “Yeah,” he responds shortly, “Turning eleven?”

They’re in the fifth grade this year and Pat is at the top of the class in almost every subject. “Fight me,” he snarls, whenever someone accuses his friend of being a study geek. They all back away eventually, but really: what can a gang of ten-year-olds do?

Actually quite a lot, but that’s something entirely unrelated. Achilles picks up his writing exercise book from the ground and flips through it, tired and unseeing, as the teacher barks out instructions for a next task. Pat looks at him, he looks back, and between them is silence.

\---

Somehow they’ve transitioned from strangers to friends, from year one to year five, from sport to english and still they’re the same people they were from the very start. “A good friendship doesn’t change you,” Pat rifles through his bag when they sit on his front doorstep, waiting for his father to come home. “I think it should make you a better version of yourself.”

Achilles is just about to contest the second-person accusatory tone that Pat has adopted, when a car comes rumbling over the gravel driveway and a man clambers out with ungainly steps. “Better go,” Pat sighs. Achilles watches the slight boy with caramel skin flick open the lock on the front door with deft fingers, followed by the beefy stockbroker from downtown. He doesn’t like Pat’s dad, but he’s never said it aloud before. Achilles suspects he already knows.

\---

He asks her out one afternoon under the cypress tree in the school courtyard, and she blinks slowly at him with her glorious owl eyes, before the air shatters around them in pealing laughter. “Yes, yes,” she exclaims, “I like you very much!”

What used to be two boys against the world becomes, instead, a boy and a girl with intertwined fingers, sweaty palms and shy conversations. Pat finishes his work before either of them think to check on him in the library after school, but that’s okay. Temporarily. Achilles makes a much greater effort the next month.

\---

His eleventh birthday is extravagant and empty, characterised by pricey decanters and the buzz of adult conversation over his head, and the stifling tightness of his starched collar and bowtie around his neck when he swallows. Achilles is in a collar, he is in the collar of the earth. Pat rescues him at half-past eight after Mr. Pelides has a row with Mrs. Pelides and insists that there be appropriate company for Achilles, meaning someone his own age. 

“Come outside,” he beckons in his pressed shirt and shiny belt buckle, “You can see the stars so clearly tonight. They must like you very much.”

It’s a throwback to the wish-wash of sunshine over his shoulders under the cypress tree two weeks ago, and Achilles flinches, winces, shies away. They haven’t broken up yet, he and his precious dream girl, but his mother doesn’t know and she is not the person he thought she was when watching from outside.

In fact, she’s even better once he has gotten to know her, but the thing his he can’t match up to her. Achilles is so deathly afraid of falling behind and she doesn’t understand it. “Who cares if I am better than you?” she demands , and Achilles feels so small in his eleven-year-old body trying to justify something that feels like a millenia-old distaste. She’s smarter and more outspoken, more educated about the opinions and events of the world, and she’s far more likeable.

\---

Sometimes they go out for ice-cream together after sport finishes the day. She orders a chocolate-vanilla double-scoop, he a strawberry with flake. Achilles usually pays, because that is the lesson that both his mother and father have drummed into him since forever. Be a man, Achilles. 

Occasionally, he goes to watch her dance in the studio close to school, and marvels in the swish of tutus, the slip-spin-slide of shoes on timber floors, the million reflections staring back at him in a wall of mirrors. “I want to dance for the president,” she confesses one evening, waiting for her father to pick her up. 

“That’s wonderful,” he tells her truthfully and she sighs, laughing..

When her father arrives, he brings Achilles’ mother in tow. She snatches his arm and drags him to the car, and the last glimpse he gets of his girl is wide eyes and a blanched face.

“Are you dating?” she demands, and he considers his options. Achilles knows when to tell the truth, and when not to. This would easily qualify as a time when a white lie would suffice, and besides, it’s not like they were anything serious. So, “Yes.”

His mother grounds him for a week.

“Why did you say that?” Pat asks, furious, on their way back from school. The terms of his grounding included no interaction with the girl - or any girls - for a week. She didn’t look his way for the whole time, averting her eyes or blatantly running away, and Achilles had to re-evaluate the worth of his defending their relationship.

“I don’t know,” he answers, eyes downcast as Pat leaves him outside his door and pedals away.

\---

For his whole life long, Achilles has been ground under the palm of his mother’s hand like an unwanted insect, living life through the chinks of light between her fingers, enclosed in a prison that never shifted. 

First there was ‘how to make friends,’ followed by ‘not this one’ or ‘wear that’ or ‘curfew’ and then ‘no drugs or alcohol.’ The unsaid undercurrent to it all was simple: ‘listen to your mother.’

When Achilles was eight, he ran away. For two days, he slept in Pat’s room. His family inevitably found out when Pat’s mother called in concern, but he didn’t begrudge that. He never begrudges anything that Pat does.

How can he?

Pat is his only friend.

Of course, that’s another debatable detail, but Achilles believes in stating the truth and he leaves it at that.

\---

“We can see the stars,” he echoes as he fumbles his way to the edge of the balcony where Pat is standing. Inside, he can hear the dredges of boring conversation and his mum’s voice, going “Achilles will be famous one day.”

He shuts the glass doors and the buzzing sounds fade away. Pat doesn’t question him, only shifts a little to the side to let him stand next to him.

“Can you find the constellations?” Pat asks, only it might be Pat and it might be Achilles, but the one thing that matters is that the question is asked. He doesn’t know who asks it.

“Orion,” he responds, “Sagittarius.” The other continues in the same breathy whisper, “Chiron” and “Artemis” and “Leo.”

“Betelgeuse,” he points to the sky, and Pat leans into him, rests his head on his shoulder. Achilles breathes in the smell of smoke and barbecue down at his neighbour’s place, the fizzy scent of champagne seeping between the glass doors behind him, and Pat’s shampoo. He inhales the city at night, and exhales all the unsaid words between them.

“Let’s run away,” he suggests, and Pat laughs. “When? Where?” Achilles shrugs. “Anywhere. Anywhere, if it’s with you.”

\---

He breaks up with the girl two days after his grounding ends, and she cries. However, she doesn’t disagree. “I’ve liked you for the longest time,” she admits, “But there’s nothing that clicks between us.”

Achilles rather thought there was a great deal that clicked, but if she’s certain, he’s only too happy to oblige. She waves goodbye with a sunlit smile and her friends take her back into their embrace, and he turns away.

Pat looks up when he walks into the library and raises his brows. They finish their homework and play basketball in the courts afterwards, all the way until the sky glows peach and violet in a brilliant sunrise stretching overhead. Achilles shoots more goals and Pat retires to the bench halfway through, but he’s dragged out five minutes later and they pass the ball between them for the rest of the time.

They pedal home together, keeping pace and keeping distance, racing down the one downhill that dips down like a waterfall and rises back up in the rearing neck of a stallion.

He waves to the sky and Pat smiles.


End file.
